You Were Expecting Someone Else 21 (The Monsters Inside)

The Monsters Inside is one of the first three books in what is unofficially called the New Series Adventures, although even that name seems, in hindsight, ever so slightly wrong. The name derives from the two other BBC Books lines that existed in 2005, the Eighth Doctor Adventures and the Past Doctor Adventures, the former of which we covered from January through April, and the latter of which we looked at alongside each of the past doctors. And the name picks up on this, implying as it does that the New Series Adventures are going to exist alongside the other two lines.

In hindsight this is rubbish. Neither the Eighth Doctor Adventures nor the Past Doctor Adventures were going to survive the year. We knew that about the Eighth Doctor Adventures, actually, but as of May, when this came out alongisde The Clockwise Man and Winner Takes All to launch the New Series Adventures, the theory was that the Past Doctor Adventures were going to keep running indefinitely, with the Eighth Doctor range being folded into it. Indeed, in May the Eighth Doctor Range hadn’t actually quite wrapped yet, with The Gallifrey Chronicles coming out the next month, alongside Eccleston’s regeneration.

All of which is to say that while to the mainstream Doctor Who was a titanic hit that was coming back for a second season and was set to be one of the BBC’s crown jewels, to fans May of 2005 was a bewildering period in which there were in fact three incumbent Doctors, the Paul McGann era having yet to resolve, the Eccleston era ongoing, and the Tennant era announced. And the question of what the auxiliary merchandise for the series would be like was still very much an open one.

Because there were, in fact, a lot of ways the merchandise could go. It could, of course, target fans. That was what Doctor Who merchandise had been doing since the 1980s, after all. That’s why the Doctor Who Cookbook and $125 Doctor Who stained glass windows made for selling in America as pledge awards for PBS existed - because adult fans could be trusted to buy this crap. And certainly this type of merchandise still exists, as apparently there are people who want to spend fifty pounds for a box set of the Pandorica chair and a River Song action figure. Or, for that matter, thirty pounds for a Winston Churchill action figure bundled with a Dalek with tea tray accessory. (And that’s just the new series. You can also, these days, spend thirty-five quid for action figures of Peri and Sil from Vengeance on Varos)

A reasonable person might have expected this to be how all of the new series merchandise would work: high end collectors items for the undiscerning Doctor Who fan with an excess of disposable income. This was basically how the novels had worked in the wilderness years, with Virgin and then BBC Books pumping out two books every month in what was actually the biggest flood of new Doctor Who material in the series’ history, especially once Big Finish got in on the act with audios.

And then there was the second tradition - that of, basically, all of the merchandise prior to the 1980s. This merchandise mostly fell into two camps: expensive stuff you got at Christmas or for your birthday, and deliciously cheap stuff you could buy with your pocket money. Implicit in this is that the target audience for the merchandise was primarily kids.

We haven’t actually talked about Doctor Who as a kids show much since the Hinchcliffe era, where the interplay of quite dark horror and childhood television watching formed a major part of our analysis. There’s an entire rhetoric of thought about Doctor Who being for children that’s difficult to grapple with. On the one hand it’s unmistakably the case that Doctor Who is a children’s show, both in structure and, when it’s a healthy and popular show, in terms of a large portion of its actual material audience. On the other, a large portion of its audience isn’t children, and since we’re all here it probably wouldn’t do well for us to slag ourselves off as idiots who are making too much of a kids’ show.

It is often difficult to reconstruct childhood engagement with Doctor Who. It is something we tend to understand only years later, after the children have grown up and channeled their memories of Doctor Who into something else - often, as it happens, more Doctor Who. And childhood memories of Doctor Who can often be misleading: the Troughton era, for instance, is remembered for its monsters and not the parts that, to a modern eye, are far more memorable. But we can still reconstruct certain facts. And one of the most basic facts about childhood engagement with Doctor Who is, historically, the Target novelizations.

Again, those interested in seeing those books covered in more detail can consult past entries, particularly those on The Smugglers, Invasion of the Dinosaurs, and Battlefield, all of which dealt heavily with the novelized versions of those stories. But the short form is this: starting in 1964 with David Whitaker’s novelization of The Daleks, and properly getting underway with Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion and Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, published together at the start of 1974 in a manner not entirely unlike the triple release of The Clockwise Men, The Monsters Inside, and Winner Takes All, one of the most important forms of Doctor Who merchandise - indeed, by most sane accounts the most important - was a series of short books adapting television stories to prose.

The reasons for their importance was varied, but had much to do with the fact that they had a sort of breathlessly functional prose provided by Terrance Dicks and that before the invention of the VCR the novelizations were the only way to re-experience a story after transmission. And, perhaps more importantly, with the fact that they were quite cheap. The result was that children grew up on these books, and in several cases the books are actually better remembered than the stories they adapt.

So when it came time to design tie-in books for the new series there really was a choice. On the one hand was the still-existent fan-centric model of merchandise, whereby the books would be aimed at particularly obsessive adult fans. On the other was the older for-kids tradition of inexpensive books. But each had their problems. The BBC Books line had been in serious trouble even before the new series was announced due to the fact that they were overproducing underwhelming material and hemorrhaging readers as a result. But the novelization model was equally underwhelming in the age of the DVD set and the dawning age of streaming video. A key part of why the novelizations worked was that the stories they adapted were impossible to experience in any other way. In 2005, that was clearly not going to be the case. (One of the injunctions repeatedly given by Davies to everyone on the series was that no matter how well the series did, they should at least aim to have something they’ll be proud to own the DVD set of - a concept that’s baffling to try to apply to any previous era of Doctor Who.)

And so what we got was… a rather strange midpoint. The New Series Adventures are, from their very name, aimed at adult fans. Their pricing and format pushes in that direction as well - unlike the Eighth Doctor and Past Doctor Adventures they’re hardcovers running about twice the price. These are not books aimed at being picked up by kids with their pocket money. On the other hand, they’re shorter than the other two lines - only about 250 pages - and consciously written at a younger audience (remembering that, to start at least, the BBC Books line was meant to be aimed at a younger audience than the Virgin one - though it’s tough to argue seriously that that mandate held to the end of the line). So what we have are kids books that are sold to adult audiences.

The content is no saner. On the one hand The Monsters Inside is a bit of a continuity parade, sneaking in references to the Kraals, Ice Warriors, and Meeps. On the other, it has bland pseudo-Dicksian paragraphs introducing the Doctor and the TARDIS (“TARDIS stood for ‘Time and Relative Dimension in Space’. This was supposed to explain how you could disguise a massive control room inside a poky police box and travel anywhere and any time in the universe, but it left Rose little the wiser.”) and summing up the events of Rose, apparently on the off-chance that anybody who accidentally spent seven quid on a Doctor Who book without knowing what Doctor Who was. On the third hand are rather actively disturbing moments like one of the prison guards referring to Rose as the Doctor’s “bit of human skirt.”

And, of course, there’s the writers. Five of the first six books came from mainstays of the BBC Books line: Justin Richards, Stephen Cole, Jacqueline Rayner, and Steve Lyons. (We’ll deal with the sixth in just over a week.) The line was still overseen by Justin Richards, who had overseen the disastrously stupid amnesia plot line that marred the latter years of the Eighth Doctor Adventures. The Monsters Inside comes from Stephen Cole, writer of the equally disastrously stupid The Ancestor Cell. It’s not that the BBC Books lines were unmitigated disasters - actually there are some really good books out of them. But they weren’t straightforward successes either.

It would, of course, also be a mistake to suggest that the New Series Adventures were completely beholden to the past. The Monsters Inside is a Slitheen story, drawing primarily from within the existing continuity of the new series, such as it was. And, as we noted, the books are almost ludicrously deferential to the possibility that someone might be entering Doctor Who through anything other than the massively popular television series. The result is a book that feels as though it’s lacking in audience.

Which is in many ways secondary to the fact that it’s lacking in point. There’s a vague sense that this might be a book about prison abuses (another piece of evidence in the increasingly convoluted question of who this book exists for), but if so only in the most superficial of ways. Mainly it’s trying to be thrilling, which is a not entirely absurd goal, but which pales so starkly in comparison to what the television series has been doing for the past eight weeks that it seems almost bizarre to do this and call it Doctor Who. And this is tough to escape - even the covers, frankly, feel like lazy attempts to look like generic and harmless tie-in merchandise. It's next to impossible to imagine a good K-KLAK coming out of this line.

Which is the problem this approach faces, at the end of the day. The Target novelizations were not great works of literature, but they were still basically A-list Doctor Who. Yes, some years the A-list included The Monster of Pleadon or The Android Invasion, but they were the proper Doctor Who stories recounted deftly. This, on the other hand, is the skippable Doctor Who in a world where Doctor Who is omnipresent already. If anything the thing they correspond with best are the old World Distributors annuals. But even those existed for a period where the audience was starved of Doctor Who at all, not just starved for a new episode.

These are at best for kids starved for new Doctor Who. Obsessives who simply cannot wait for a new episode of Doctor Who. And, more to the point, who have adopted Doctor Who as the thing they’ll ask their parents for. They are tools for people to commit themselves early to a phase of Doctor Who fandom, and ideally for a lifetime of it. In this regard there’s something ever so slightly unsettling about them, especially inasmuch as The Monsters Inside is actually referenced in Boomtown, giving it a curiously “official” feel that feels ever so slightly cynical. It’s a sense that Doctor Who’s main purpose is to make a lot of money. Its method in doing that might be “make good television,” and if so, it’s a rather lovely method, but it also feels ever so slightly like a Rupert Murdoch clone wearing the Reithian public service mission of the BBC as a skinsuit.

And yet there’s a possibility here. These books may be a small part of Doctor Who and a not very good one, but those have existed at every single turn of Doctor Who, including the fan-driven memorabilia era of the 1980s, and have had their odd influences on the program. Gareth Roberts nicks imagery from the Patrick Troughton Polystyle comics. Grant Morrison name-checks the Fish-Men of Kandelinga. Frobisher appears in a Rob Shearman audio, then a Rob Shearman audio gets adapted for television. The Monsters Inside includes a reference to the Meeps, from early Doctor Who Magazine comics. The Pestacons was mistaken as an important story worth novelizing. Russell T Davies worked kronkburgers into The Long Game. Odd things recur, such that we might, when some 2042 television producer finally caves to pressure to bring back the Slitheen for the Christmas special even though they only appeared in two stories nearly forty years ago, we might just get an off-handed reference to their sibling family the Blathereen.

In other words, whatever the motivation here, this is the sort of thing that has existed any time Doctor Who has been in a generally healthy state. Its quality is almost beside the point, as is the clarity of its purpose. When Doctor Who is doing well, it generates strange auxiliary merchandise. That, at least, is happening.

Sunday Pancaking

Well, I'm not going to make a habit out of having two weekend threads, but my dialogue with Mac Rogers on The Name of the Doctor just went up on Slate, so that's probably there and fun to read. Or at least there and fun to have written. Thanks again to Mac and the folks at Slate for letting me play.

So while I'm opening a second front in the "let's all discuss Name of the Doctor" battle, I figure I'll toss out two (completely unrelated) questions to my readers to see if anyone can help.

First, I've been searching for months now for any copy of Springhill, Russell T Davies's two-season apocalyptic soap with writing by Gareth Roberts and Paul Cornell. This seems a complete wipeout - nobody is getting anywhere close. It's a massive missing link in the history of Davies's Doctor Who, and there's barely any information about it out there.

Second, and thinking ahead instead of back, I'd like to do a post on Outpost Gallifrey sometime during Series Two. Ideally adjacent to Love and Monsters. Unfortunately, the forum is long since gone off the Internet. I don't suppose that anyone, for some bewilderingly freakish reason, has an archive of the long lost forum, and specifically of the threads that sprung up around that episode? If so, you're a bigger digital packrat than even I am, but please do get in touch.

In both cases e-mailing me is probably more sensible than discussing in comments.

Saturday Waffling (May 18th, 2013)

EDIT: Just to be official and emphatic on it, spoilers are allowed in the thread here, and if you don't want to be spoiled you probably want to be in a different thread.

So, I imagine the discussion on The Name of the Doctor that starts up in a few hours will be interesting. I actually have seen most of it already - through wholly legitimate means (I'm doing another thing for Slate - though actually, the episode never leaked to BitTorrent at all, contrary to rumors). I suspect the fault lines on it will roughly map those of the Moffat era in general - those who like his stuff will love it, those who hate it will probably hate it. For my money, it and The Snowmen are the two high points of the season. And when my further thoughts on it go up on Slate I'll let you all know.

In other news, I've just discovered that The CW is doing a remake of The Tomorrow People. I've gone ahead and embedded the trailer and a clip from the first episode for your horrified entertainment. I'm not at all certain how you'd even begin to go about presenting The Tomorrow People to an American audience. You have to explain why it's not just the X-Men, I suppose. And I doubt the original series' answer - that it's utterly, flamboyantly gay - is going to cut it for modern American network television. So I'm not sure what their Plan B is on that. So yes, that looks awful.

Finally, reader Dave Simmons dropped word of an Indiegogo campaign to save a local indie bookstore in St. Louis from closure due to a developer buying their (really quite gorgeous) Victorian Gothic Revival location so that they can tear it down and build a storage facility. Here's the link for that. I'm terribly partial to indie bookstores even as I'm horrifically in bed with Amazon and thus with many of the things forcing them out of existence. So if you're in the St. Louis area, please do consider kicking them a few bucks.

And now back to trying to finish catching up on this week. At the time of writing, just two more blog posts out of this stretch to write. God help me.

Crying Silently (Father's Day)

Technically more a Time Wyvern than a Time Dragon.

It’s May 14th, 2005. Akon has finally unseated Tony Christie, giving the new series its second number one hit with “Lonely.” Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Destiny’s Child, Will Smith, and Weezer also chart. In news, Manchester United is bought by Malcolm Glazer, which is by any measure a key event in the transformation of the Premier League into a heavily leveraged playground for the super-rich.

While on television, it’s Doctor Who as only Paul Cornell can write it: intimate and Anglican.

Where The Long Game struggled with the need to fit itself into a single forty-five minute capsule, Father’s Day is one that could only ever have worked as a single, contained episode. Its structure functions in part because of its claustrophobia - because there’s outright no way out of the church. By keeping us in the intimate scene without breaks we get a sense of confinement no six-part base under siege ever managed. Because the base under siege is the model of this story, once you go far enough under the hood. Monsters are closing in from the outside, the Doctor is desperately trying to come up with a plan, and deteriorating political factions within the base eventually endanger everybody. (In this case the slowly boiling fight between Jackie and Pete that eventually results in the two Roses touching.)

But we’ve never seen a base under siege like this quite before. The base is so ostentatiously small, such that we can trivially get wide shots of it to stress just how trapped everyone is. Instead of having three Ice Warriors in one room talking about the terrible things they’re going to do to the base we can see the monsters flying around the church, scraping at the windows, laying siege to it. This is partially a case of Cornell’s choice of settings - a church is rather a more intimate sort of base than, say, a space station. But it’s also down to how the new series works, shooting primarily on location and using CGI monsters such that having a bunch of wide shots of a church with time dragons milling about is, if not trivial, at least no harder than knocking up three monster costumes.

And given that, the forty-five minute structure is great simply because it prevents there from being any release from the pressure. And it does so without any significant rushing of the plot. Because, of course, the plot of this is terribly thin. There’s very little actual concept to this: Rose creates a paradox by saving her father, and only her father’s death can right things. Everything else is just a set of contrivances to keep the plot running - most notably the entire “reforming the TARDIS out of the key and a cell phone battery” thing, which exists virtually entirely to get the plot to forty-five minutes. But it’s not like those forty-five minutes are overly stretched, simply because the sci-fi plot isn’t the point here.

No, the point is the scenes in which Rose, her mother, and her father interact. This isn’t a story about creepy time dragons (apparently officially “reapers,” but let’s go ahead and treat them unofficially. They look like time dragons, so that’s what they are) and paradox resolution. It’s a story about absent fathers and disappointment, and about the real and material world we live in and how it relates to the world of magic. The time dragons are just there to force a couple months of EastPowellStreet to resolve in forty-five minutes. (Really, more soaps should have time dragons. This is the central innovation of Game of Thrones: Adding dragons to a soap opera.)

In that regard, the episode, at least as a Doctor Who episode, positively luxuriates in the space it has. With an a deeply slender plot it has space to be by and large an episode of EastPowellStreet (and note that the setting is 1987, during the period where Doctor Who was on opposite Coronation Street and during EastEnders’s initial heyday), with far more of its scenes dealing with the Tylers than with time paradoxes, which are explained in an extremely sketchy and metaphoric fashion. (Compare to what we’ll be talking about on Wednesday, where the plot is absolutely massive.) This means that the base under siege is intimate not just in the sense of being a particularly small base under a particularly present siege, but in the sense of being a personal and intimate story.

In dealing with the new series I’ve tried to avoid going too far into hinging my interpretations upon the observations I made over the preceding twenty-eight months about the classic series. But it’s impossible to avoid the comparison to the Troughton era here. There’s a generation of fans that are convinced that Season Five of the classic series, airing in 1967-68, was the high point of the series. That season consists of seven stories, six of which follow the format generally described as “base under siege,” in which an isolated location is under continual attack by monsters on the outside. And for a large swath of Doctor Who fans this is the archetypal and best possible sort of Doctor Who story.

When dealing with the Troughton era I was increasingly critical of the base under siege, suggesting that it was increasingly stale and, worse, characterless. Plots hinged on the internal politics of the base, but in the broadest and most superficial way possible. Characters tended not to have “character traits” so much as broad roles generally defined in terms of how much they do or don’t listen to the Doctor. And at the end of the Troughton era the Doctor was exiled to Earth by the Time Lords in a move that I read as being in part a repudiation of the base under siege, its intrinsic xenophobia, and its failure to engage with the mundane world. His charge, in other words, was to engage with people and to be engaged with the earthly and human level.

With Father’s Day we get a story that feels almost consciously crafted as a response to this. (It’s telling that one of Cornell’s enduring bugbears throughout his writing on Doctor Who are his issues with the Pertwee era, which he simultaneously despises and is fascinated by the redemption of. In this regard Father’s Day can be read as actively taking up the challenge that the Pertwee era largely failed at.) It’s a base under siege, yes, but it’s one where the entire content of the conflict is personal and human. Even the base - an Anglican church - speaks to the basic humanity of the situation. It’s telling that what allows the handful of survivors to hole up in the church and survive is the fact that the church is an old structure, i.e. that it is something that mulches up from the (here we go) material social history of Britain and, more specifically, of that particular community.

More broadly, it’s a base that is under siege from “improper” family dynamics. The essential nature of the conflict is Rose’s desire for her father’s presence in her life. But it’s also telling that the wedding around which the chaos unfolds is an “improper” one of an already expectant couple. Or, rather, it’s under siege from the rejection of those improper dynamics. Nothing in the story, after all, suggests that Rose is in any way harmed by growing up without a father, or that Stuart and Sarah’s premarital sex is in any way condemnable.

Indeed, Cornell walks a rather wonderful line in these matters. On the one hand he’s completely unwilling to suggest that being raised by a single parent on a council estate is a “bad” life in any way. Rose remains - as she should - largely unimpeachable as a character. Even her big sin, altering history, is ultimately forgiven by everyone, with the Doctor even trying to help her get away with it in the end. But on the other hand the story absolutely validates Rose’s desire for her father. The fact that she had a perfectly good life (indeed, given that she met up with the Doctor, canonically the most wonderful man in the universe, she had the best life possible) does not mean that her sorrow over never knowing her father is invalid in the least.

This is interesting in several regards, as her sin is, in the end, a wholly theoretical one. The inviolate nature of the timelines is not an actual ethical principle, but rather a narrative conceit. In reality nobody has an ethical obligation to maintain the consistency of the timeline. It’s simply not a real ethical concern. But because narratives with inconsistent and self-contradictory timelines are very, very hard to do (since Aristotelean narrative principles depend in part on the assumption that once something has happened it will continue to have happened indefinitely), time travel science fiction tends to insist on an ethical injunction against changing history simply because the alternative is characters who break the narrative.

Part of this hinges on the nature of Rose’s supposed sin. Even though Rose does a bad thing within Doctor Who’s status as a sci-fi narrative, she doesn’t do a bad thing in any context that can be translated to EastPowellStreet. Within that show the idea that saving her father’s life in a way that harms nobody in an identifiable way is meaningless, and the fact that the universe resists it by sending time dragons to slaughter the entire population of Earth is mainly a reflection on the cruelty of the universe. (There’s a sort of odd theistic bent to this - the sense is that if the Time Lords were still around the universe wouldn’t be so hostile, but in the absence of divine protection we’re at the mercy of a deeply callous cosmos.) And so what we get is an odd end-run around the ethical question. The problem the Doctor has with Rose’s actions becomes ultimately one of her not listening to him, not one of her doing something “wrong” as such.

This implicates one of the larger and more difficult to untangle themes of Davies’s tenure, which is the relationship between the Doctor and romance. On the one hand Davies ultimately and unambiguously treats the Doctor and Rose as a love story, albeit one with an odd line in the sand it refuses to cross. (But Journey’s End is months off.) On the other hand, there is a continual hesitation, especially at this stage. The Doctor and Rose both repeatedly reject the label that they’re boyfriend and girlfriend, but on the other hand parts of their relationship are difficult or impossible to read any other way. Their fight early in the episode is coded as a lover’s quarrel, even though the Doctor’s fundamental issue - that Rose didn’t listen to him and blundered into danger - is basically a parental one. The disjunct here is interesting and complex. Rose throws “you’re not the most important man in my life” at the Doctor, accusing him of being romantically jealous, but by all appearances his objection is a paternal one. Note that their reconciliation is much more father-daughter - “just tell me you’re sorry.” And more to the point, the end of the story tacitly equates the Doctor and Pete, with Pete sacrificing himself not only to save everybody but to restore the Doctor.

It’s possible to read this upsettingly, as a messy and problematic entanglement of romance and paternalism that supports a “men are in charge of women” reading of relationships. But much like the xenophobic reading of The Unquiet Dead, that’s obviously not what the story intends. Rather, it seems to be indebted to a socially realist approach. (Another detail worth remarking on - Ahearne’s savvy decision to focus the camera on mundane objects from time to time, often after someone is eaten by the monsters. It’s a decision that grounds the entire plot in the materiality of the world, stressing how these characters exist in a larger social context.) Its message is manifestly not an ethical one so much as a documentary one: relationships are complicated. Things can work out and still be sources of sorrow. And, as with Stuart and Sarah, things can go wrong and still be sources of joy.

Central to this is the character of Pete. Tellingly, Pete is not a great father or a great man. In fact, he’s a deeply flawed man who ends up admitting openly that he would not have been a great father, and that he certainly isn’t the object of hero worship that Rose built him up to be. His marriage to Jackie was strained and probably doomed, even if it was based on genuine love. He was a slightly dodgy salesman - a sort of loveable n’er-do-well. His restoration to Rose’s life would not have been some massive utopian moment. And yet his absence is still allowed to hurt, even in the face of the disappointing revelation that he was just an ordinary man with all the foibles and faults that implies.

And the Doctor, of course, remains at an odd point at the margins of this. On the one hand he’s a magical figure who can give Rose the closure she needs over the death of her father, allowing everybody to have a moment of reconciliation Pete’s arbitrary death denied them. (Though equally, it’s his death that enables it.) On the other, he’s limited in his power, forced to the sidelines, and ultimately left out of the real resolution of the plot. His magic comes at a price, and, as with any magic, is as limited as it is potent.

All of which, it must be said, derives heavily from Cornell’s past involvement in Doctor Who, most notably in the Virgin New Adventures. Those unfamiliar with the wilderness years can track down the entries in the blog’s archives, but suffice it to say that Cornell was, for a period in the mid-90s, more or less the most regarded writer in Doctor Who. And his central idea was the collision between the Doctor’s epic grandeur and the everyday, with a particular focus on the human level of stories. This was the history Davies was drawing on when he tapped Cornell to be one of the additional writers for the first series, and Cornell’s brief was explicitly to do something with the tone of his Virgin material.

The result is at an odd midpoint for Cornell. Again, detailed readers of the blog will recall that I’ve not been entirely enamored with parts of Cornell’s work past Human Nature. He went through a comedic period that was largely entertaining, but that lacked the heft of his older “serious” material, and then had a stretch where his Doctor Who work often felt a bit frustratingly like trying to recapture lightning in a bottle as Cornell hit the familiar problem of trying to satisfy fans of his older material while growing past it himself.

But with Father’s Day he finds himself in an almost perfect milieu for his take on Doctor Who. More than any other writer, Davies included, Cornell is capable of writing Doctor Who inside a soap opera. The slight remove of time (this is only the second time of five that Doctor Who has set a story in the past and also within Doctor Who’s transmission history, taking place while Delta and the Bannermen was showing) is a clever trick here, because it renders EastPowellStreet at just enough of a remove to be conspicuous instead of seamless. In Aliens of London/World War III it’s possible to miss the soap elements for all the other content, but here it’s unmistakable. The 1980s setting also suits Cornell’s aesthetics, which are very much out of the anti-Thatcher counterculture of the time. Cornell stands out from other wilderness years writers in part for being more indebted to the Sylvester McCoy era than any other era of Doctor Who, that era in turn having been steeped in the anti-Thatcher counterculture. Virtually all of the wilderness years writers were fans, but Cornell was a fan of the program that had just gone off the air, thus providing the greatest sense of thematic and conceptual continuity. This pokes through in odd places in the story, in fact - one can easily imagine the opening scene, particularly the Doctor’s “be careful what you wish for,” coming out of McCoy’s mouth, albeit with a very different staging.

But Cornell also benefits from one of Davies’s major innovations within Doctor Who: the decision to have the Doctor continually involved in the life of a perfectly ordinary family, and to have that involvement recur in multiple stories. For all Cornell’s innovations and advances in the humanity of Doctor Who, the Tylers are very much a Davies idea, not a Cornell idea, and they end up providing the secret sauce that makes Cornell’s already very clever and successful take on Doctor Who jump to the next level. The result is a story that feels wondrously mature, and, more to the point, like Doctor Who that has grown up and developed. It’s packed with real emotional content and relationships that feel human. More than any other story this is the one that fulfills Cartmel’s note to Davies on The Long Game - a story about a man who’s worried about his marriage, mortgage, and dog. Coming after the half-successes of The Long Game it feels like a needed correction - a story set in the 80s that fixes the problems of one indebted to them, symbolically stitching the wound of the series’ cancellation from yet another angle.

And, of course, continuing the process of initiating the public into Doctor Who, staking out new territory that it can cover. With this story it properly, fully subsumes human drama into its wheelhouse. With only one gloriously Marmite exception, the series never goes quite this mundane and small-scale again. But having done so it acquires a weight and presence that shaped and reshaped the direction of the program every bit as much as Rose or Dalek. We get to add another thing to the list of what Doctor Who can be: an intimate story about broken families and ordinary lives. With monsters.

Slammed, Ergo, a Teaser

New Wave Superfriends, by Butcher Billy

The wedding last weekend has me a day behind on all my writing, and I'm stuck with two or three extra projects this week as well, so I've just been slammed busy this week and haven't had time to bash out even a little bit extra to post. At some point I suppose I'll have to master the art of conversational chattiness. Or linkblogging. That's what people do these days, isn't it. Link blog. So I guess I could link to this interview with Jaron Lanier, which raises various troubling questions about the economy I'm making money in now and the like. That said, I cannot shake the sense that Lanier is just a really crappy futurist.

In any case, and more extensively, I figured I'd share the introduction to the eventually forthcoming Wonder Woman book. Still no release date yet, but I know it's been clanking about for a while, so I figure I should show something.

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Nobody indulges in utopian visions anymore. On the rare occasions when people do - the playing at classless society offered by the Occupy movements in late 2011, for instance - the general reaction is, at best, one of condescending pity. Utopians, in our culture, aspire towards harmlessness. The best of them are charmingly naive people you might want to invite over for dinner, but would never actually want to put in charge of anything. More often, though, utopianism is viewed as outwardly sinister. You can see it in the line of political attack taken against Barack Obama. Not just the outright false claim that he’s a socialist (a political view that has produced a disproportionate amount of utopian literature), but the basic claim that he wants to transform America. That this is prima facie a bad thing - that the desire to engage in radical change to improve things is self-evidently terrible and evil - shows just how far utopianism has fallen.

On the rare occasions we do allow ourselves to dabble in the utopian, our visions are almost exclusively eschatological. If there is to be a utopia it can only come after a cathartic purging of society, whether at the hands of the gods or at the hands of humanity’s own folly run amok at last. Some better world may follow from the ashes of this one, but the idea of transforming this world into a better one, as opposed to simply leveling it and starting over, is all but completely gone.

It wasn’t always like this, of course. Our cultural landscape is littered with the debris of abandoned utopias. Many, though not all, emerged from the years following World War II, a golden age of utopian thinking. These were the days of gleaming space colonies and cute robotic servants that allowed everyone a life of perpetual leisure. Entire popular genres emerged from these dreams, only to, starting in the late 1970s, find themselves shell-shocked survivors: a set of images without a purpose. The idea that, in 2012, we’d not have colonized Mars, little yet that we wouldn’t even have a clear vision of how we were getting there someday, would be unthinkable to the world of the 1960s.

Some years ago, there was a briefly popular book called Where’s My Jetpack? that mused on the various futuristic technologies that never arrived. Implicit in the book is a sort of jaded longing - a sense that the future we were promised never arrived. This is, on the face of it, strange. The machine I’m writing this on is more advanced and sophisticated than the wildest dreams of post-War science fiction. I carry a telephone around with me that outdoes anything Star Trek imagined for the 23rd century. Clearly the future arrived, and from a purely technological standpoint, while markedly different from what post-war futurists imagined, it’s pretty impressive. But it’s not utopian. The longing for the jetpack is less a longing for individual human flight as for the lost utopian vision it was a part of.

Wonder Woman was not the last of the utopian visions that followed the Second World War. If anything she was one of the first, created during the war itself to serve both as an anti-German propaganda tool and as a vision of what post-war society might look like. But she is the last one standing. The reasons why aren’t terribly complex: she always avoided the most common utopian iconography. Her utopianism was not one of rocket ships and gleaming cities, and so when the steam went out both of those technologies and of utopia she was not as straightforwardly discredited. She escaped the purge of utopias by disguising herself as a silly superhero comic.

In another sense, however, she survived because her utopia was discredited so early on that it never had time to negatively impact the character. Her creator, William Moulton Marston, envisioned her as the avatar for a sexually liberated female supremacist utopia so lacking in any real-world credibility that it was unceremoniously abandoned before the end of Wonder Woman’s first decade. Having learned to suppress her utopian zeal early, Wonder Woman had fewer problems enduring the wave of cynicism that felled her utopian contemporaries. She was already used to playing down her own radicalism.

Either way, she survived. And while there are only a handful of moments in her history where she’s been prone to laying out an explicitly utopian manifesto, she’s survived as an essentially utopian character in a world that has little, if any, use for utopianism. This has, unsurprisingly, not always been a smooth ride. Wonder Woman is a character who is extremely well-known and well-liked, but with only a few exceptions her comics have sold at best mediocrely, and she’s never done as well as Superman and Batman when adapted into other media. She is at once a universally recognized media icon and an arcane, niche character.

It also means that her history does not track well with any larger political movement. It would be convenient if a history of Wonder Woman paralleled a history of feminism neatly, but it doesn’t. At her debut she was far more radical than the feminism of the time. But at the political height of feminism in the late 1960s/early 1970s came at a moment where feminism and Wonder Woman were cast on opposite sides of a debate, and even though Wonder Woman adorned the first issue of Ms., Gloria Steinem’s feminist magazine, the actual relationship between the two was fraught at best.  In the early 2000s she was ahead of the curve in terms of the emerging strands of feminist geek/sci-fi fandom, but in the present day, when that fandom is considerably more advanced, she’s suffered more than a few setbacks.

But equally, it would be foolish to suggest that Wonder Woman’s history is somehow insulated from larger social movements. Wonder Woman has changed with the times. But her relationship with social change is neither to follow the trends nor to establish them. Rather, she is something else - a persistent thorn in the side of cultural progress. She is the ghost of abandoned and “childish” utopianism stubbornly refusing to sit quietly in the corner while the grown-ups are talking.

As such, her history is a strange one. She frequently finds herself marginalized and silenced, often by her almost exclusively male collection of writers and artists, many of whom are clearly openly hostile to what she represents. Equally, she often finds odd perspectives on the margins that subvert and undermine assumptions, giving a voice to viewpoints that would otherwise be completely overlooked. Often, in fact, she does both at once, her basic concept finding odd ways to reassert itself in the face of overt attempts to diminish both it and her.

This book traces that history, telling the story of Wonder Woman’s evolution in her primary medium: the comic books published by DC Comics since 1941. Though her comic book appearances form the main spine of the book, there are frequent excursions into her appearances in other media, and into the larger context in which the comics exist. The book does not endeavor to explain the plots of every Wonder Woman comic that it covers; it is not a guide to her continuity or character history, but rather to the history of her publication and the approaches taken to her.

That said, it is not written with the assumption that the reader will have read all of, or indeed any of the comics discussed. I’ve tried to provide enough context to follow the argument, although anyone seeking to consult the original comics will no doubt find plenty of surprises and details that I’ve not mentioned. Many, though not all or even most of the comics discussed have been reprinted by DC in various collections, and I recommend those. For the ones that are not in print, Chris Hayes has a phenomenally detailed website called the Amazon Archives available at amazonarchives.com, which provides rough summaries of most of Wonder Woman, and which was an invaluable aid in jogging my memory over the course of this project as I forgot which of the hundreds of issues of Wonder Woman comics I read a given story appeared in. Also essential is the Grand Comics Database at comics.org, which provides detailed information not only on Wonder Woman comics but on nearly a million different comics.

This thorough and completist approach to Wonder Woman’s history, by its nature, risks losing the forest for the trees. I have generally speaking  spent more time on those periods that were historically important, but the nature of Wonder Woman’s history is that it is messy and disorganized.She is the product of dozens of writers and artists over the course of nearly seventy-five years of history, and her history is not the product of any ordered or organized process. Consequentially, substantial focus is given over to periods of Wonder Woman’s history that have had little influence on the whole. In many cases it is precisely this lack of influence that is interesting, as it reveals the various secret histories and alternative visions of what Wonder Woman could have been.

More to the point, however, the messiness this approach engenders is well-suited to the project. When it comes to Wonder Woman, the idiosyncrasies of the trees are more interesting than the homogeny of the forest. Various themes and motifs will recur throughout the history, but they do not do so in an orderly way that progresses towards some grand and unifying conclusion. Nor could they possibly, given that Wonder Woman’s history is ongoing and this book will be outdated by the time it is in your hands. But this is appropriate. But more to the point, this messy and unfinished process is, I think, an accurate account of what material social progress looks like.

Wonder Woman’s history is the history of a discredited utopia that refused to lie down or go away. It is neither a triumphant nor a tragic story. But it is, I think, the story of how the determination to make the world a better place plays out in that world. And in that regard it is, at least, a story brimming with wonder.

Audioarchitectonalmetrasynchosity (The Long Game)

At last, the new series pays homage to one of the most
fundamental transitions of the classic series: monsters that
look like cocks.

It’s May 7th, 2005. The damn Tony Christie song is still at number one, stubbornly keeping me from getting to ay anything new. Snoop Dogg is new to the charts this time, as is Destiny’s Child, and Bruce Springsteen’s return to moody acoustic form Devils and Dust is topping the album charts, but it’s mainly a bit of a slow one in music. In news, Tony Blair wins his third successive general election, but with a sharply reduced majority that in effect starts the clock on his resignation as Prime Minister in accordance with the Granita pact. Which is a fairly good week for The Long Game to air during, given that it is, in the end, a story about the way power functions in the background.

It would have been easy not to do The Long Game. Much as the series could have avoided a remake of The Web Planet, it could have avoided ever touching the 1980s stories like this. The Long Game, in terms of structure and concern, belongs to the Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy eras. Actually, in a perfectly literal sense it belongs to the Sylvester McCoy era. Its basic story is from the script Davies submitted to the Doctor Who office while Cartmel was script-editing - the one Cartmel rejected with the suggestion that Davies write something more grounded, with the specific suggestion of “a man who is worried about his mortgage, his marriage, his dog.”

The critique is interesting in terms of what The Long Game became. The suture between the two versions is, after all, relatively obvious. The original story consists of the bits about overthrowing a despotic news organization, which fits smoothly into the Cartmel era’s sensibilities. One can fairly straightforwardly imagine Russell T Davies watching Paradise Towers or The Happiness Patrol and thinking “ah, yes, that’s the way to do it.” Actually, the story The Long Game has the most obvious similarity to is Vengeance on Varos, which, if the 1987 date for Davies’s failed submission is correct, suggests pretty straightforwardly that Vengeance on Varos and Paradise Towers are the two big antecedents of this.

There are worse things. It’s not like the 1980s were a wasteland of irredeemable stories. There were some high points, and Vengeance on Varos and Paradise Towers were among them. (For newer readers, yes, Paradise Towers really is absolutely brilliant.) But what’s striking, as I said, is that it would have been easy not to do it. I mean, perhaps not easy to resist turning your fifteen-year-old script submission into an actual episode as a sort of cackling and triumphant “I’m in charge now,” but certainly easy to bury the 1980s. None of it made a particular cultural impression in terms of Doctor Who beyond “they’re the rubbish years.” That is, of course, not true, but it would have been perfectly easy to just never mention it.

Then again, it would have been easy not to mention The Web Planet, which Davies did immediately. Part of the project of the first series has been not just to map out the scope of what Doctor Who can do but to make a case for its extremes. Davies is focused intently on creating a broad concept of Doctor Who that draws on all of the good bits. Not just all of the popular bits or the beloved bits, but all of the good bits, which, to Davies, includes no shortage of the rubbish bits. So of course he doesn’t take the easy option of pretending that Doctor Who ended with Tom Baker.

Mind you, it doesn’t quite work. It tries, but there’s a fundamental problem, which is that the type of 80s story that Davies is trying to emulate is based on world-building, which is the one thing forty-five minute episodes aren’t that good at. Paradise Towers has a wealth of problems as a story, mainly in its larger plot structure. But the time it spends in the texture of its world, looking at what its panto JG Ballard tower block is like is, generally speaking, gold. Similarly, the best thing about Vengeance on Varos is its exploration of the sick and nasty world of Varos and its entertainment/political culture. And those are both things that oddly enough, work because of the relative luxury of a hundred-minute structure.

The move to forty-five minute episodes means that instead of worlds we get iconographies. The 19th century Cardiff of The Unquiet Dead in fact consists of a theater and a funeral home, and only the latter actually has any substance, but because it’s such a familiar set of textures we don’t need more than that. It assumes an audience who is used to Victorian costume drama, and thus that isn’t going to worry about the world too much. Put another way, what The Unquiet Dead asks isn’t “what sort of world is this,” but “what sort of story is this.”

Even when Davies has done the alien, as in The End of the World, it’s been based on iconography. He builds a gaudy set of images of strangeness, but he grounds them all in the momentary familiar of 2005. But in The Long Game he has a story that was actually written for a 1980s model where exploring the world mattered. And he just doesn’t have time to. Satellite Five never feels like a coherent place. There are bold attempts - the scene of Cathica slowly realizing how the news manipulates perceptions so that nobody need to ask questions is marvelous. But that’s also the point of the story: that the nature of giant news media is that it can manipulate the world into not noticing that something is wrong.

Put another way, if a major part of your plot hinges on the fact that the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire is wrong then you probably need enough space to communicate what it’s supposed to be like and how it’s being manipulated. And we just don’t have that here, because that’s not what the forty-five minute format is good at. Maybe, just maybe it could have been done in forty-five minutes if that was the entire purpose of the plot - Davies will, in future years, manage to sketch worlds much more deftly, most notably in Gridlock. But here Davies insists on grafting the Adam plot onto it.

Ironically, it’s Adam’s scenes that give the most texture to the world, but it’s not the right sort of texture. It’s miles from the news stuff, and is mostly odd technical details about the head-opening stuff, which is a cool visual but probably didn’t need quite as much explication as a sense of what the news coming out of Satellite Five is like. For the most part Adam’s plot jars with the Satellite Five plot - there’s not enough room for both, and they don’t bolster each other sufficiently.

As a result Satellite Five never quite comes to life. Simon Pegg is wasted as the villain here, not because he’s anything less than fantastic (he’s the best thing about the episode), but because he’s too good for the material. He ends up anchoring the entire story - in the absence of a well-developed world or a particularly innovative plot (this being a bog-standard 80s Doctor Who plot) the story becomes about his marvelous villainous turn.

Nor does Adam quite come to life. He never has any motivations beyond being a bit shit. He was apparently supposed to, and scenes to this effect got shot, but they were ultimately cut for space reasons, further highlighting the degree to which there was simply too much going on here. But much like Aliens of London/World War Three doesn’t quite figure out how to get the two-parter to work, here Davies can’t quite figure out how to get both components working. He tries to do too much for a forty-five minute episode. It was bound to happen eventually, and like Aliens of London/World War Three is more properly a weak spot in the season than it is some sort of aesthetic disaster.

At the very least both parts of this story are, on their own merits, interesting. It is nice to see the 1980s structure of Doctor Who employed again, especially because it was the structure of many of the best episodes of the late 1980s. And it’s nice to see the series used for this sort of bracing social critique. Underneath this is something wonderfully politically radical - the idea that our entire sense of the world is, in practice, a lie created to maintain existing structures of power, and that it can only be disrupted through a careful mixture of curiosity and impertinence. The suggestion that the existence of Rupert Murdoch/The Jagrafess is actually retarding the progress of history itself is wonderfully audacious. It’s difficult not to love this story just for its scope alone; is there another new series story that’s so willing to just brazenly advocate revolution? The double-header of this and Dalek, and really the triple-header of those and Aliens of London/World War Three are all deliciously prescient. For all that we’ve talked about how Series One is first and foremost about the televisual landscape of 2005, the concerns of these stories age very well: corrupt wealthy people and disaster capitalism remain wonderfully 2012 concerns.

Meanwhile, the exploration of a bad companion is interesting. The working title of this story - The Companion Who Couldn’t - shows where the focus was, which is on Adam. This is an interesting exploration of the role of the companion, and an interesting angle to take on it. We’ve never really seen the companion defined in negative before. It’s been an annointed role - one you ascend to by playing a particular part in the narrative as opposed to through any actual character traits. So by showing us a failed companion we understand a successful one better, or, at least, we should.

But in that regard perhaps cutting all his motivation was a mistake, but even in the absence of an explanation for the character we have something where the iconography works. Adam contrasts Rose nicely, in part because his actor, Bruno Langley, is a reasonably major soap star with a Coronation Street run. Given that Rose is characterized, at her base, as coming out of the soap opera tradition, this sets up a sensible contrast - we’re invited to compare Adam to Rose. But what’s the difference? Adam is selfish, in a specifically capitalist/profit-driven way? Fair enough, but that’s not a difference that actually stems out of the soap opera milieu Adam and Rose hail from, so it’s a bit pointless.

And anyway, if Adam is selfish, what’s Rose in contrast? Well, actually, in this story she’s not anything - this is by far the least the companion has had to do all season. Because there’s not enough time for three plots her only role is asking to have the plot explained to her, and even that gets subsumed by Cathica so we can have the ordinary people rising up and taking charge at the end. As a result, she has nothing to do in the plot save for the fact that she frees the Doctor because her cuffs come undone first. So what we get is “Adam time travels for his own self-interest, whereas Rose is basically passive and just wants to soak in new experiences.” Which is, first of all, contrary to everything the episode is trying to say, and, second of all, is blown away as an explanation by the very next story, which is all about Rose acting selfishly in terms of time travel.

So what we get is basically “Adam doesn’t work as a companion and Rose does because Rose is Rose.” Which is tautological, but not necessarily problematic - indeed, this is basically the argument that backs up Rose’s ontological force in later stories, and it’s not one I have any problem with in the general case simply because Rose, like the Daleks, has at this point acquired a genuinely totemic force in the narrative. (Put another way, would anyone seriously object to a story that portrayed Ian and Barbara as super-special companions?) But seven episodes into the new series we’re not there yet. Past episodes have made the case for Rose’s centrality by demonstrating her narrative-transgressing powers. This one just blithely asserts it in a way that’s a bit hazy and unconvincing.

But not quite working is hardly a major or unprecedented sin in the world of Doctor Who. The series would be poorer if it didn’t try and come short with some frequency. And inasmuch as the first series is a land grab to establish the scope of Doctor Who it’s terribly useful. Along with Aliens of London/World War Three this story assimilates the news into the fabric of what Doctor Who is, as well as making it clear from the start that overthrowing corrupt structures of power in allegorical sci-fi societies is one of the basic milieus of Doctor Who. It doesn’t work, but we can ourselves afford to play the long game and see how it puts key pieces into place. The scope of what Doctor Who can be remains dizzyingly ambitious. And if it’s not always extraordinarily good, it is at least consistently non-awful and reasonably watchable.

Put another way, every show has weak episodes. If this is the quality level of crappy Doctor Who, we’re in good shape.

Kickstarter Wrap-Up

So, we're in the final 24 hours of the Kickstarter. It looks like we're going to fall just short of the goal of the illustrated version of the Three Doctors post  - though I suppose a last minute push is possible. Someone buying the Soldeed video, for instance, would put the goal in sight...

EDIT: Actually, we're now just $600 from doing the Blake book. It could just about happen...

In any case, if you want to get in on the Kickstarter, you probably should get going - several of the reward levels are deals that I'm not planning on offering again at the end of the Kickstarter. Most notably, the $10 "starter kit" of ebooks is the only time you'll be able to get the first three volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum at that price for the foreseeable future. And while I may offer commissioned essays and signed books through other means soon, I don't intend to offer essays that will go into the books again at all.

Finally, a general answer to questions I'm sure I'll be getting - I'll be in touch with all of the backers through several means. First, I'll send out a backers survey in the next few days to figure out the Kickstarter-exclusive essay topic (basically, I'm going to suggest the upcoming Marc Platt audio The Beginning, and unless there's a sizable objection, do that) and to get everyone's e-mail. At that point I'll have a Soldeed-esque THREEEEEE ways of contacting you: your e-mail, Kickstarter updates, and this blog. I will basically use all three regularly when I need to update you with anything.

No, failing to meet the $15k stretch goal does not mean I will never do the Blake/Three Doctors book. It does mean that I'm going to wait until I see how the Logopolis book does, however, before I make plans.

Any other questions I'll happily answer in comments. Or discourse at length about what I have or haven't learned doing a Kickstarter.

In any case, I just wanted to use today's post to say: whether you have donated, are about to, or just can't manage it, thank you. The last month of running this blog has been an absolutely wonderful ride. I was hoping to be able to get to the original $1k goal that would let me pre-fund the Hartnell book itself, and was prepared to fund it out of pocket if I fell short.

I woke up the next morning clearly not having to worry about funding the Hartnell book again. And that's just been the beginning. I get to do a special edition of the Logopolis post, to start selling t-shirts, mugs, prints, and other cool stuff, and to start in on the podcast commentaries, all of which are terribly exciting.

And perhaps most importantly, it formed the point where I really started thinking of this as my primary job and source of income, with adjunct teaching as a sort of hobbyist sideline. Which is a really nice and satisfying place to be. That the Kickstarter month coincided with the new site launch, getting to do the DePaul event, the new series, and a bunch of other stuff is just tremendously, wonderfully gratifying.

So having said that, let's carry on. I'll keep targeting five updates a week, three of which will be Eruditorum entries, plus a nice weekend chat thread. The blog will remain the same old thing that you know and love, except for those of you who know and hate it, in which case it will still remain the same. And over the next year or so I'll tease and explore some other projects as we move forward - the oft-mentioned British comics project, yes, but also... other idle ideas I have. So those will surface someday. But first, tomorrow, The Long Game, and the oft-desired discussion of forty-five minute episode structures and their limitations. (Well, one part of it. Father's Day is part-written at the moment and also about that.)

But mostly, you know.

Thank you.